The Second Best Place For This One To Be

At the Ohio Show, Rob Bader did not disappoint. Early Sunday morning, he walked up to me with that familiar cat-that-ate-the-canary grin on his face. But this time, he wasn’t holding a pencil.

"There’s a rare pencil here today," he said, "and you don’t have it. The person selling it knows what it’s worth, but you should buy it."

Now that’s confidence, I’m thinking to myself. But since Rob hasn’t yet steered me wrong, all I said was "lead the way." And Rob did.

Tucked away in the back corner of the hallway, a few tables down from mine, was a vendor with a tragic story. Texas collector Stan Pfeiffer, who co-founded the Houston Pen Show and was one of the organizers of the L.A. Pen Show for a number of years, was killed in a fire at his home in Houston last summer, and the fire also damaged much of his pen collection. Stan’s longtime companion, Ginger Welch, brought some things from Stan’s collection to the Ohio Show to start liquidating them.

The things that she brought were really something to see – red hard rubber overlay pens and plenty of other fantastic fare like that. But a lot of what was there had some kind of damage, and all of it still smelled like a fire.

There wasn’t room enough in the display case on top of her table to accommodate everything she brought during the first couple of days, but as things sold, she would pull items from underneath the table and fill in the gaps. I hadn’t paid much attention to her display – not because it wasn’t spectacular, but because when I looked at her table earlier in the show it didn’t look like she had any pencils in the mix that interested me.

But Rob Bader was keeping a close eye on what was emerging from under her table to fill in the gaps, and he took notice when this one emerged early in the day on Sunday:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 2, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and everywhere else you buy books, or you can order a copy signed by yours truly through the Legendary Lead Company HERE.